Buried for Pleasure (18 page)

The loudspeaker van's first excursion had taken it from Sanford Morvel to Sanford Angelorum, and thence a short distance towards a minute village romantically and quite inappositely named Dawn. When about three miles from the nearest telephone, it had, however, broken down simultaneously in all departments, and it was now back at the electrician's undergoing treatment appropriate to its relapse. Fen would have been delighted to have abandoned it altogether, but for Captain Watkyn the whole campaign was tending to resolve itself into a kind of duel between himself and the van, and he declined to hear of such a thing. In this matter, he gave Fen to understand, his professional reputation was at stake; by hook or by crook he was going to have the damned van back on the road by Polling Day; and Fen, after arguing the point feebly for some minutes, was forced to give in.

Even more disconcerting than the loudspeaker van was the problem of Mr Judd. Mr Judd had run politically amok. His early reluctance to be active in Fen's cause had given place with horrid swiftness to an excess of zeal which both Fen and Captain Watkyn found a serious embarrassment. He insisted on taking the chair at all meetings; he orated unquenchably; he spent hours in Sanford Morvel library assembling a factual indictment of the Party system in politics and elaborating this into a philosophy of history. And upon such topics as the origins of Whiggery he talked at Fen and Captain Watkyn in season and out, to their consternation and dismay. At first it seemed probable to Fen that all this constituted an attempt to please Jacqueline, but in view of the disinterested vehemence of Mr Judd's goings-on he was presently compelled to abandon the theory. Mr Judd, it became plain, was reacting as only a normally retiring man can react to the excitements of public life. They had gone to his head like (I quote Captain Watkyn again) strong wine, and whereas previously he had shunned them, now he could not have enough of them. Fen and Captain Watkyn found being in his company a severe trial of their patience, for Captain Watkyn had never had any interest in political problems as such, and Fen had temporarily lost whatever interest he might previously have felt. They contemplated Mr Judd's unforeseen fervour with the fatalistic horror of Frankenstein when confronted for the first time by his monster. And Mr Judd plunged unheeding on, like the broom of the sorcerer's apprentice, and neither Fen nor Captain Watkyn could think of any spell powerful enough to stop him.

‘Opsimath,' said Fen dismally. ‘Having embarked on politics for the first time late in life, Judd has got obsessed with them; just as a child, on discovering it can write its own name,
goes on
writing its own name until it drops down from exhaustion.'

‘Ah,' said Captain Watkyn sagely.

It is undeniable that Mr Judd's zeal won many supporters for Fen; but his efforts may have been nullified to some extent by the editor of the
Sanford Advertiser and Peek Gazette
, who, in his determination to requite the service rendered him by Fen's father, disastrously overstepped the bounds of good sense. He published, on the Thursday, an issue which overtly flouted those great canons of impartiality in British journalism to which British journalists are so assiduous in calling our attention, by extolling Fen and his candidature to the virtual exclusion of all else. Even Captain Watkyn, whose optimism constituted a necessary adjunct of his livelihood and so was not easily quenched, felt some misgivings.

‘The fact is, old boy, it looks deuced fishy,' he said. ‘It looks like what it is, a put-up job, and I'm afraid it'll do you more harm than good. Astonishing how tactless some of these journalist Johnnies are.'

By this time, of course, there were at large in the neighbourhood journalist johnnies of a more portentous kind than the editor of the
Sanford Advertiser and Peek Gazette
. As has already been said, the Sanford election, in its beginnings, received scant attention from the nation at large; a few of the more popular newspapers came out with small heads like ‘Don-detective Enters Politics', but the pressure on their space was too overwhelming to allow of more than the briefest paragraphs. The outbreak of murder, however, and the escape of Elphinstone offered more promising material, and moreover, by some unfathomable logic, enhanced the interest of the election; and soon political and crime reporters were rubbing shoulders in the Sanford bars and, in the intervals of quarrelling fiercely about their accommodation, foraging abroad for pabulum for the presses. Since Fen was involved both in the politics and in the crime, he was a good deal sought after. But his Machiavellian attempts to barter inside information about the murders for political support produced a deadlock. No journalist on the spot – as he might have known, and probably did – was in a position to make such bargains, and this was just as well, since Fen did not possess any inside information about the murders and, if his offers had been accepted, would have had no recourse but to invent some: an exercise in which, though undoubtedly skilled at it, he would ultimately have been detected. The reporters were consequently obliged to content themselves with Mr Judd, who was prepared to talk inexhaustibly about both crime and politics. His
obiter dicta
, on the former subject at any rate, were widely published; Annette de la Tour's sales rose perceptibly, and Annette de la Tour's publisher took to drinking Lafite instead of Margaux with his lunch. A very general contentment prevailed.

On leaving Wolfe and Humbleby at the hospital, Fen went to ‘The White Lion' to seek out Captain Watkyn. He was discovered lurking unhappily in the lounge under the compelling, ancient-mariner-like eye of Mr Judd, whose political albatross, the Party system, had acquired additional plumage from the previous afternoon's work in the public library, and who was now expounding this at length. Fen silenced him for long enough to ascertain that no arrangement had been made for that morning, and then uncivilly fled, driving back under a cloudless sky to ‘The Fish Inn'.

He procured coffee, and drank it perched on the garden roller, brooding disjointedly over the election and the crimes. Within the inn, Mr Beaver and his coadjutors hammered monotonously away, presently introducing a variation in the form of a saw whose voice was the voice of a corncrake in intolerable agony. Fen rose hurriedly and left the precincts. He subscribed wholeheartedly to the view of Sir Max Beerbohm that nothing so effectively inhibits thought as going for a walk, but at the moment no better alternative offered itself. He set off rather dejectedly along the village street.

There was one turning which he had not so far investigated – a lane which led up past the Rectory and which terminated, according to an ancient sign-post, at the town of Wythendale twelve miles away. He accordingly set off along it, and presently paused at the Rectory gate to survey both the incumbent's dwelling – a large, nondescript grey building – and the incumbent himself, who, clad in disreputable flannels, was bending down to peer at a diseased-looking hollyhock in the front garden. From these objects Fen's attention soon strayed to a brightly hued insect which was perched on a twig beside the gate, and he prodded it experimentally with his forefinger. It at once stung him viciously and flew away. Fen, who lacked stoicism, uttered a cry of anguish and dismay, at which the Rector abruptly straightened up to stare in his direction. And in the instant following, a small white coffee-cup was projected from one of the upper windows of the Rectory and sailed past within a centimetre of the Rector's nose.

CHAPTER 16

Now even in the most trivial afflictions Fen regards it as the inaliena ble duty of his fellow-men to offer him instant sympathy and relief, and to continue offering them during all the lengthy period of his complainings. He would not, therefore, normally have considered it other than entirely right and seemly that the Rector, at his cry, should hasten towards him with every appearance of the deepest anxiety and solicitude; where the pastoral duties of the clergy are concerned, Fen is a particularly exigent and fussy sheep. The present circumstances, however, gave him pause. It was no doubt the Rector's business, after the first shock of surprise at being assailed with a coffee-cup, to thrust his own problem into the background of his mind and rush to succour Fen; but it was a little surprising that he should so completely ignore the coffee-cup as not even to glance in the direction whence it had come. It now lay, unbroken, on a flower-bed near him; he could not conceivably have failed to-see it, or at least to feel the wind of its passing; yet he might, to judge by his total failure to react in any of the expected ways, have been entirely unconscious of it. By the time he arrived at the Rectory gate, Fen was regarding him with some distrust. Moreover, it quickly appeared that the Rector's anxiety was functioning in the wrong direction.

‘What did you see?' he demanded. ‘What was it you saw?'

‘Saw?' Fen frowned reprovingly. ‘I saw a coffee-cup thrown at you, if that's what you mean.'

‘But your cry anticipated the throwing of the cup, if I'm not much mistaken. Can it be that you saw the thrower?'

‘No, it can't,' said Fen uncivilly. ‘I uttered an involuntary exclamation because I'd just been stung, and that most painfully. Look.' He held out his forefinger for inspection.

‘Stung. Ah.' The Rector's anxiety grew visibly less urgent, and he put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles in order to examine the injured part. ‘Dear me, yes. By a bee, by a wasp?'

‘By, I think, some venomous tropical insect.'

‘Blue-bag,' said the Rector. ‘It must be treated with blue-bag.' He paused, and his face assumed a rather artificial expression of great shrewdness. ‘But there is, I am afraid, one thing which I am bound to ask before inviting you inside. Are you by any chance connected with the Psychical Research Society?'

‘The Psychical Research Society?' Fen echoed in surprise. ‘No, indeed I'm not.'

‘And you would hardly – ha! ha! – be a believer in the supernatural?'

‘Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that,' Fen answered rather impatiently – and at once saw that he had said the wrong thing, for the Rector's expression changed, at the reply, from shrewdness to definite apprehension. ‘However,' Fen added hurriedly, ‘I'm prepared, if you wish it, to suspend my belief for as long as it takes to be treated with blue-bag.'

The Rector appeared to ponder deeply; and eventually arriving at a decision: ‘Come in, then,' he said, unlatching the gate. ‘I'm afraid you'll be thinking me very discourteous and unready to help, but the fact is that what has just occurred puts me in a rather serious quandary.'

‘The sting?' said Fen, whose sufferings continued to hold precedence, in his own mind, over all else.

The Rector was leading the way along the path and round the side of the Rectory. ‘No, no,' he said over his shoulder. ‘The coffee-cup.' And by a tulip-tree he halted with such abruptness that Fen nearly cannoned into him. ‘It would be useless, no doubt, to imagine that you are not curious.'

Fen's thoughts were preoccupied with blue-bag, so it was rather perfunctorily that he agreed that such a supposition would, indeed, be false.

‘Exactly so. And I feel that I must therefore take you into my confidence. . . . I am right, of course, in thinking that you are Professor Fen?'

‘Perfectly right.'

‘My name is Mills.' And apparently feeling that this intelligence would be sufficient to occupy Fen's mind for the time being, the Rector resumed his progress, fetching up shortly at the back door. Fen followed him in a dazed condition.

‘Mrs Flitch,' the Rector called, opening the back door. ‘
Mrs Flitch
.'

A small, intense, untidy-looking elderly woman appeared, clutching a mop. ‘Yes, sir,' she said breathlessly. ‘Yes, sir, yes, sir.'

‘Blue-bag, Mrs Flitch. This gentleman has been stung.'

‘There now,' said Mrs Flitch. ‘Well I never.' She retired, exclaiming continuously, into the kitchen, and was heard opening drawers and cupboards. Presently she returned with the blue-bag, and Fen dabbed it on the sting. It did not seem to do much good. He gave it back to Mrs Flitch, and the Rector, whose thoughts during these proceedings had transparently been elsewhere, took him by the arm and led him to a wooden seat on the lawn behind the Rectory.

‘And now, to resume what I was saying,' said the Rector. ‘About the coffee-cup, that is.'

The pain, Fen thought, was abating slightly; presumably blue-bag took time to do its healing work. And he felt more capable, now, of attending to the matter of the coffee-cup, which, he began to realize, was decidedly queer. ‘Yes?' he said encouragingly.

‘You will, I hope, keep what I am going to tell you a dead secret.' The Rector briefly glowered at Fen, as though attempting to assess his capacity for reticence. ‘Indeed, I must ask you to promise that. There is nothing of an immoral or – um – criminal nature in what I have to say, but
serious inconvenience
may be caused if it leaks out.'

‘Ah,' said Fen without comprehension. ‘Well, you may rely on my discretion. And please understand that you're under no obligation to tell me anything at all, if you don't wish to do so.'

‘But it will be better for me to do so, I think. And besides, it would be unfair to you
not
to do so.' The Rector hesitated, drawing a deep breath. ‘You will have heard,' he said, ‘of Borley Rectory.'

‘Most people have, I think. And there's no doubt, to my mind, that it was in some fashion haunted.'

‘It was very thoroughly investigated,' the Rector remarked, ‘over a period of years.'

‘Quite so.'

‘In fact, the incumbent can have had very little peace.'